


No Mercy

by wishonadarkstar



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 21:18:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16730808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishonadarkstar/pseuds/wishonadarkstar
Summary: It's a game, really, but that doesn't mean that Dryden Vos isn't playing for keeps.





	No Mercy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiriamKenneath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiriamKenneath/gifts).



Qi’ra has never been one to understand his baser urges.

Certainly, she’s also never turned him down when he’s game for something she considers beneath her-- beneath them-- but this isn’t the sort of thing that she’d ever pursue for herself.

The thief is much like many of the various mercenary types who flock to the scant refuge his organization offers; perhaps he’s a little more human than many of them, but he’s not the only pure human.

He knocks back fine wine like it’s the worst bootleggers’ moonshine, and grins at the bartender.

Dryden gestures to her, and she obediently pours the man another, her gaze lacking even the hint of censure that some of his more esteemed colleagues might offer. The man looks down the bar and his face goes slack with recognition when he sees Dryden.

Good, Dryden thinks. He likes it when they know they’re the prey. It’s better that way.

He salutes the man, and the man raises his glass, knocks it back again, his throat working around the liquor.

After a second, the man shrugs, his whole body moving with it. Dryden can read so much into that that he licks his lips in anticipation. The man has never known a life that wasn’t hardscrabble, desperate.

Most of those who flock to their organization have, but there is always an outlier, someone who came for the joy of crime, or for some personal moral leaning, to fight someone or revenge someone.

They’re not nearly as fun, because they don’t realize that Dryden has not only seen their hand already, but he’s dealing every card and he doesn’t care about the rules of the game.

A man like this, though, he’s well aware of the rules to this game.

It’s better this way, Dryden thinks: everyone knows what’s going on. A game of cat and mouse where the mouse has no idea he’s not a cat just hasn’t got the same appeal.

“Dryden Vos,” the man drawls, leaning over. “I hear this is your party.”

“Indeed it is,” Dryden said, his smile coating his face and his voice, and the other man shudders a little bit. He smiles back, but it’s not a pleasant smile.

That’s quite all right with Dryden, actually.

“And you are?” Dryden prompts, smiling wider. He can feel the other man’s fear and fascination, and he likes it, likes the way it’s heavy in the air between them.

“Taken,” the man says, bold as anything. As if on cue, his gaxze fastens on someone over Dryden’s left shoulder. He looks, because he may as well know who the man would risk Dryden’s displeasure for, and he sees a woman. Pretty, he thinks. Smarter than the man in front of him deserves, probably, but then Dryden could see having someone like this as a partner for reasons other than his good looks and wits.

Sometimes, the person you keep is the one who draws fastest in a fight.

She raises an eyebrow at Dryden, or at her paramour, and then shrugs, frowning.

Dryden gestures at the nearest of his staff, and immediately someone approaches her with a tray full of food and a smile that’s a lot more genuine than anything he’d have been able to pull off.

Excellent help is the key to a successful empire, after all.

“Taken care of, it seems. Your name? I don’t normally ask questions twice.”

“Tobias Beckett,” the man bites out.

Dryden likes that small sensation of winning, even when it’s his game and his rules. If makes him relax, and he watches as the bartender relaxes with him, before handing them more drinks.

“This one’s for sipping, Beckett,” Dryden says, handing it to the man.

Beckett glares and knocks it back, as Dryden had known he would.

He doesn’t even cough.

Dryden coils his hand around the other man’s wrist.

“What brings you to my humble abode?” Dryden asks, guiding him away from the bar while taking a much more judicious sip of his own drink. “Money? Not pleasure, it would seem. Prestige? Violence?”

“Just tryin’ to make my own way,” the man replies.

“Oh, certainly, certainly,” Dryden says even as he gets Beckett into one of the private rooms off the floor of the club. “But then, the beauty of our kind is how many different ways there are to make, don’t you think?”

“Look,” Beckett begins, and Dryden frowns.

Beckett, being not entirely a stupid man, takes a careful step back.

Dryden squeezes his wrist hard for a second, then one more, before letting go.

“I’ve never seen you around here,” Dryden says. “And most don’t come to the Crimson Dawn without a very solid reason behind them.”

“I’m just a thief,” Beckett says. “Nothing special. I heard Crimson Dawn needed criminals, and here I am.”

“Here you are, indeed,” Dryden says, looking him over. “And that woman, your partner: what is she looking for?”

Beckett bites back an answer, and Dryden notes it. Don’t press that button, or don’t yet, he thinks.

This little game isn’t worth that sort of mess, not yet.

“This could be simple,” Dryden says. “This could just be a matter of you make me happy, I make you happy.”

“Look,” Beckett says. “I’m not new. I know that nothing involving… the Crimson Dawn is ever that simple.”

Dryden licks his lips. “And here you are anyway,” he says.

Beckett looks around, noting in turn the large, soft sleeping surface, the cabinet of sundries, the controls for the entertainment.

“Here I am anyway,” he says, then abruptly he starts to unbutton his coat.

Dryden laughs.

“Oh, come now-- I’d have thought you’d need more negotiation? Don’t you want to know how I’m going to make you happy?”

Beckett looks him dead in the eyes, then, and Dryden feels it deep to his core. More to him than he looks, he thinks. More than just a simple criminal.

He’s good, Dryden realizes. Not much; whatever moral fiber had made him up had been beaten out of him years ago. He reminds Dryden of one of the surviving clones he’d met, once.

Dryden had quite liked the desperate remnants of honor the man had clung to. A shame he’d had to kill him, but even Dryden had orders he had to follow.

Besides, one can’t leave an enemy with honor alive: that’s the surest way to losing.

“Dryden Vos’s word is better than credit, everyone knows that.”

Dryden laughs, surprised Beckett’s willing to admit that out loud.

“Then you have my word,” he pauses for a moment stretching out the anticipation as much for his own enjoyment as to see if Beckett will squirm. “That we will negotiate our terms once I’ve satisfied my…”

Beckett stares at him, his fingers twitching on the buttons he has yet to unfasten. “Curiosity?” he suggests, sounding half-timid, half cocksure.

Oh, Dryden will enjoy this.

“I was going to say prurient interests, but certainly that works.”

Beckett laughs, a startled noise that Dryden can tell he didn’t mean to make.

Dryden lets himself laugh in response, and then he gestures abruptly at Beckett.

“Come now, we’ve tabled the negotiations, and you’re wearing entirely too many clothes for me to enjoy myself.”

“Right,” Beckett says, and then he swallows, shakes himself, and his fingers work down the front of his coat at record speed.

He’s careful with his clothes, which isn't quite what Dryden had expected. They get neatly folded and set aside as he gets them off, and there’re rather more layers than even Dryden had expected.

“You know, my yacht is kept at the Imperial standard 20 degrees. You needn’t have bundled up so,” Dryden comments.

The clothing isn’t clean, exactly, but it’s kept tidily enough, with careful stitching holding together a rip here, a very well applied patch over what appears to be a blaster burn there.

Dryden likes this, the little note of care in an otherwise careless demeanor. He wonders at the other secrets Beckett has hidden behind his mercenary’s eyes, and thinks that perhaps it would kill him to try to find out.

That excites him, a thrill spreading through his spine and over his skin, and there’s no reason not to indulge the feeling.

“Hmm,” Dryden says, watching still as bare skin is finally revealed and there are as many scars as he was expecting, but Beckett doesn’t seem to notice his own nudity the way most would, either by preening or by pretending modesty.

He stands there, watching Dryden now, and Dryden cannot bear to disappoint him when he’s been so cooperative thus far, so he starts unbuttoning his cuffs, the movement as careful and practiced as anything else he’s done thus far.

“I must say, Tobias Beckett,” Dryden says, musingly, as he rolls up his sleeves. “You are both exactly what I expected, and a perpetual surprise.”

“That a good thing?” Beckett asks, and it’s a demand.

The rebellion in him is something delicious, thin and belated as it is. It’s not unexpected, no, the criminals he tends to stalk and carry away tend not to enjoy being on the losing end of things. It is, however, exactly what Dryden Vos had wanted when he’d plucked the man before him out of a crowd to play with, on a whim.

“Simply an observation. Here now,” he says. “I want to taste you.”

Beckett kisses him, then, which does surprise Dryden a little bit. He’d expected to have to make his claim a bit more physically before Beckett gave in, but this was as good as the pursuit would have been, he thinks.

Beckett kisses him with more force than finesse, and Dryden lets him take the lead for a few moments, his teeth biting sharp against his lip, though not sharp enough to draw blood.

When Dryden takes control, there is blood, and it’s hot and bright between him. Beckett makes a small, animal noise, but he doesn’t fight when Dryden grabs a fistful of his hair and jerks him up a little, putting him off balance.

Beckett’s hands are hot even through the material of Dryden’s tunic, and Dryden pulls back a little bit to regard him. He’s naked, of course, and the vulnerability he’d not seen earlier is there in full force now.

Perhaps it’s the way his lip is still bleeding, the mark of Dryden’s teeth like a brand on his face.

“There’s a bed, there,” Dryden says, gesturing.

It takes Beckett a moment, but then he’s self-assured again, grinning and drawing attention to the wound on his mouth, and he backs up, taking hold of Dryden’s tunic and drawing him with him.

“You gonna take that off?” Beckett asks, his fingers skating across the piping that details the garment, but making no move to unfasten it.

“I think not, actually. Why, will that hamper your… creativity?”

Beckett snorts. “Not if it doesn’t hamper your prurient interests, it won’t. Come on, Dryden Vos. Better make sure I’ve got a story to go with the rest, here, hadn’t you?”

Beckett’s trying to pick up Dryden’s speech patterns, and he wonders if that’s deliberate or if it’s some sort of survival instinct bred into him on whatever planet had trained him to treasure his ragged clothing.

“You’ve heard stories, then?”

“Oh,” Beckett says, very carefully kissing the corner of Dryden’s jaw. He runs his hands through Dryden’s hair, too, but doesn’t take any more liberties than that. “Loads, really. Nothing you’d be interested in, probably. Well, maybe. One girl, hear tell, swears up and down that you have a bifurcate--”

Dryden silences him with another kiss, sucking to make sure that the cut he’d bitten earlier still smarts, and then he pushes him down against the bed, careful but inexorable, giving Beckett a chance to put up the seeming of resistance that many men he’s bedded have preferred to demonstrate, but Beckett doesn’t.

He lays back all a-willing, and his legs are parted, obscene.

Dryden likes his scars, the way they tell more about the galaxy they live in than they do about any one man.

He’s got his own scars and stories, of course, but they’re not for this man to know.

“I am almost entirely human,” he says, pinching a nipple and enjoying the response it evokes. “Especially in that regard, as you’ll discover soon enough.”

“You know,” Beckett says, once his breath is back and Dryden has exhausted the reaction of that singular touch. “You’re a lot more into foreplay than I’d have figured.”

“And now I hear these stories malign me!” Dryden says, tsking and shaking his head.

“Nah,” Beckett says. “Just your first impression, really.”

Dryden laughs and stifles his laugh in skin, this time biting a mark in the man’s throat. He can’t quite make him bleed, here, but it’s not for want of trying.

It would be nice, maybe, another time, to linger and mark him over more and more, until his skin is branded and more than branded, until Dryden’s superiority is written over him in blood and bruises.

That’s not for now, though, not with the rest of his day pressing him for time, not when he’s barely had a chance to hook this man, this mercenary who isn’t powerful enough to ever refuse Dryden.

The games he plays with men like these always last a lifetime.

Instead, he moves down, bites the nipple that got him such a reaction earlier.

Beckett makes a new sound, animal and base, but there’s pleasure written there, and Dryden notes that, thinks: I can own you, and you will love it.

Beckett’s hands are everywhere, like he can’t control them, stroking through his hair and touching his jaw, his throat, the arm he isn’t using to support himself.

Everywhere that Dryden is bare to him, Beckett touches. Another thing to note, another game he can play later, and it’s then that Dryden realizes.

I am going to keep you.

Beckett freezes, and Dryden hadn’t meant to think that so firmly that the man would know it, but it’s too late now.

He makes eye contact, draws back, smiles again. It’s the same smile he’d given the man at the bar, and Beckett, he thinks, recognizes it.

“You just gonna play around, or was there going to be a point to this.”

“Eager, are we?” Dryden says, settling back on his heels so he’s straddling Beckett. He likes the way the man looks, naked under his fully clad body.

It’s a sort of vulnerability that one can only engender with a good deal of manipulation or a good deal of power.

“Only, none of this so far has really been the sort of thing you’d need a private room for, is all.”

Beckett cocks his head and firms his jaw and Dryden likes him very much in this moment, in this pose.

He reaches for the cabinet, ignoring the variety of adventures in offers in favor of some simple lubricant.

Another time, he promises himself again. As many times as he can manage, he thinks.

“You want me to?” Beckett asks.

“It seems the thing, doesn’t it? Would you like to make a show of it?” he gestures vaguely, but doesn’t back off enough for Beckett to have the access he needs.

“I think you’d like it better if I didn’t,” Beckett says. “Lots of people putting on shows for you, but you want to be surprised.”

“Oh, maybe,” Dryden says, smirking down at him.

“Only a very little bit,” Beckett says, pinching his fingers together. “Not blaster bolt to the back surprised.”

“A blaster bolt to the back isn’t as surprising as you might think, given my position.”

Beckett wrinkles up his whole face in a frown, propping himself up on and elbow and squinting at Dryden.

“Nah, now that I’m actually thinkin’ on it, it seems exactly the sort of thing. No, the other kind of surprise, maybe. Blaster bolt defending you back maybe, from someone you didn’t pay to trust in advance.”

“Ah, now, that does sound like a good sort of surprise,” Dryden says, leaning down to whisper the last in Beckett’s ear, “But do try to remember I will, in fact, be paying you very well indeed so that I may trust you.”

Beckett darts in, kissing the corner of Dryden’s mouth, just a little bit, then he leans back and arches up, pushing Dryden back with his thighs and his back in a smooth, sinuous motion, and then he gets the lubricant out, and there isn’t a show, exactly.

It’s more information, is all, another thing to note, the way Beckett puts his whole concentration on getting himself ready to be fucked, his pleasure seeping through the edges, but not the goal, not the result.

“You enjoy this, then?”

“Not the threat of certain death if I piss you off, really,” Beckett says.

“Ah-ah,” Dryden interrupts, touching his lips. “I prefer that much remain unspoken, if you please.”

Beckett snorts a little, then traces Dryden’s fingers with his tongue, an incongruously playful gesture that has Dryden surprised again. The better kind of surprise, really. It has something going for it.

“Well, then, this, a good drink, a good fuck? Yeah, that I enjoy. You don’t?”

“Hmm,” Dryden says.

He is taken aback, really, because the fact is: he’s not sure. Perhaps he does like the sex, the alcohol, the base nature of it all. It’s sort of like killing, in that it has never displeased him, but it’s not something he’s given to seeing as anything but a means to an end.

“I may at that,” he says.

“Good,” Beckett says, and then he’s wiping his hand clean on the sheets, and Dryden wonders how he prefers this, since he likes it.

Would the man like to see who is taking him?

In the end, it’s the bite across Beckett’s mouth that decides him. He wants to taste it again, to make it so it lasts longer than the next bacta patch, so he unfastens his trousers and bites Beckett again, and then he sinks into the warmth of another being, and the taste of blood punctuates a thought.

He does like it.

He likes the way Beckett twists under him, looking for his own pleasure, the way everything about them sort of falls away for long moments, erases the now-spoken threat of death if Dryden comes away dissatisfied.

There is sweat, and skin, and heat, and the breath of another being panting in his ear. There is the taste of saliva and blood and the salt of exertion.

There is pleasure.

Beckett comes with a twist of Dryden’s wrist, staining his clothing, but then he was always going to change them, after this.

Dryden comes a thought after that, satisfied in a deeply animalistic way that even killing doesn’t quite match up to.

He leans into Beckett, listens to their breath calm, notices that Beckett doesn’t quite match his respiration.

Their sweat and ejaculate cools between them, and finally, Beckett shifts and touches Dryden again, his hand cooler now, than it had been before.

“So,” he says, soft and not nearly as cocksure as Dryden expects. “You said we’d negotiate after?”

Dryden laughs and touches the cut on Beckett’s lip.

“I’m sure we can find you some way to earn money in my employ,” Dryden says. “I have a meeting, just now, but one of my assistants will see to it you’re well taken care of.”

Beckett laughs, soft and different from all the laughs that had come before.

Dryden really does look forward to keeping this one.


End file.
